In <200011161504.HAA21180_at_stockholm.ptloma.edu>, on 11/16/00
at 10:17 AM, Cameron Kaiser <spectre_at_stockholm.ptloma.edu> said:
>Ahem. Disks are not emulated by tape in the 64. In the 64, Commodore had
>buggy hardware and decided to cripple the serial bus to compensate, hence
>the speed. Many, many companies designed fast loader applications; my
>favourite, the Epyx FastLoad, uses some of the other serial port pins to
>do parallel transfers. Tape is terribly slow also, but then again highly
>reliable since programs are actually written twice, and then checksummed
>on top of that. Barring freaky loaders of which there are many, ?LOAD
>ERRORs are unheard of on the 64 and VIC-20 (unless you run the tape over
>with a truck or a faulty bulk eraser -- and maybe not even then :-).
That is something the Atari NEVER had - a reliable tape drive. The tapes
were SLOW - 600 baud. Though you could do a poke to triple the speed, the
tape would just fail to read anyway. It was really horrible. Most folks
got disk drives partly in self-defense. Fortunately, the disk drives are
bulletproof (untested at range ;-)).
>As a followup, Commodore fixed the serial bus in the C128. In 128 mode
>with a fast-serial peripheral like a 1571 or 1581, serial bus transfers
>fly. And they say USB is an original idea. ;-)
Yea, the Atari's serial buss is a lot like USB also. The more things
change, the more they stay the same.
>Also note that the 64 doesn't care what the hard drive's format is. It
>doesn't have to, because it has no DOS internally (just Kernal routines
>to write commands to the serial bus and the devices listening are
>expected to know what to do). So while the CMD hard drives, which are the
>major serial bus hard drive these days, can run in an emulation mode
>where they pretend to be a whole lot of disks in a jukebox, they can just
>be one huge disk and it doesn't make any difference to the C64. The only
>reason they offer that mode is for clueless commercial software that
>expects to be in a "real" 1541. Partition switching is not that hard
>either -- sending a / disk command is not very onerous. If you want real
>paths, there's a 80-byte patch I have somewhere that emulates it through
>recursive / disk commands.
I was not aware there was any way to address big drives on the C=, but
what you say makes sense. The machine and it's mass-storage are so
divorced you could use carrier pidgeons for transfers.
>I don't understand. The DOS is in the disk drives, and you send it
>commands over the serial bus. This means you can implement anything as a
>filesystem device as long as it understands serial bus protocol. If you
>mean like an Atari DOS menu, well, we're clueful enough not to need menus
>in the Commodore world. ;-)
Spartados, the dos that finally won the DOSwars on the Atari 8-bit is a
command-line dos with most modern features like subdirs, a large path
size, a system path like MSDOS, I/O redirection etcetera. To allow a user
to access your machine via modem it only requires that your modem be set
to auto answer and that you enter "print R1: cr/lf - R1: cr/lf" Sparta's
redirection takes care of the rest. Syntax ranges from MSDOS - like for
earlier v ersions to MSDOS for the flagship Spartados X. They were a bit
skittish about lawsuits early on.... Most were menu-driven, but OS A+, DOS
XL, and Spartados were command-line. Sparta is by far the best of them
and, thank God, provided True random access within files. The funny thing
about the some 30 dos(es) for the Atari 8-bit is that they were all
compatible with one another insofar as running software was concerned.
>GEOS had its own *fast loader* but still used most of the 1541 DOS
>routines for things like scratches and renames.
A lot of effort was spent trying to fix inherent i/o problems.
This is fun! I'm learning too!
Regards,
Jeff
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President
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30 Greenwood Rd.
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828-277-5959
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Received on Thu Nov 16 2000 - 09:17:31 GMT